


and theseus wept

by inkk



Category: Guns N' Roses
Genre: Aging, Angst, Brief suicidal thoughts, Hurt No Comfort, Loneliness, M/M, Memories, Mental Health Issues, Passage of time, Post-Split, Pre-reunion, axl needs a hug, seriously this is just depressing as shit, vaguely 1997-2014ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 00:51:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17929637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkk/pseuds/inkk
Summary: Skip, next track, fast forward.





	and theseus wept

+

 

 

 

 

Steven is gone.

Izzy is gone.

Slash is gone.

And Duff—

 

Duff’s gone, too.

 

 

 

In a life that’s always been filled with noise, it seems like Axl Rose himself has fallen into a hush.

 

 

Six years of a choked canary.

 

 

 

The months pass too fast, for a while there. Nothing is a whirlwind; nothing is exciting, or new. His name isn’t in favour anymore. Hasn’t been for a while.

Time blurs when it starts to gets cold, sitting in the outskirts of a spotlight he’s known for so long. Axl wonders if it’s for the best that he’s been shuffled to the side — those press vultures seem to care more about his appearance than anything else he’s been doing lately, anyways.

 

January 2001 is set up to be the comeback of the century, except in the end Axl isn’t sure that it is. It’s just him in Brazil, two hours late, wearing sunglasses and some weird shiny shirt as he dances around and tries to relearn something that used to come more naturally than breathing. All the guitar parts are still there, like road maps on the back of his hand, except every time he looks over in search of that familiar top hat he either finds a KFC bucket or a tall, skinny, goth-looking motherfucker with a shaved head standing there instead.

Buckethead’s great.

Robin’s great.

It’s great.

 

 

 

 

> _“Rose's years as a Malibu hermit haven't improved his always precarious fashion sense: he lumbered around the stage, a ridiculous leather pork-pie hat partially covering his equally ridiculous red-haired Rasta braids. But the biggest problem was the voice [...] Its power was diminished and much of the primal rage was gone, replaced by an uncertain desperation. Rose looked deeply frightened that night and his one new song was another terrible self-pitying dirge. Meanwhile Chinese Democracy is still not completed. [...] What is this bizarre individual doing to himself?”_
> 
> **Is Axl Rose Finished?**  
>  by Nick Kent (The Guardian - Jan 3, 2003)

 

 

 

Hiatus. Leaked songs. Lawyers. Buckethead’s gone.

Skip, next track, fast forward.

 

 

 

Fuck Chinese Democracy. Fuck Stephanie Seymour. Fuck Slash and Steven and Izzy and Duff and Alan fucking Niven and Doug fucking Goldstein. Fuck ‘em all.

If Axl had the spine, he thinks he would have killed himself back in ninety-two. He should have, maybe. Could have been his chance to finally beat Kurt to the punch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course he still thinks about Kurt.

 

 

 

 

He can’t give up now, though, can he?

That would be too easy. He’s destroyed far too many lives to have any right to check out early.

 

 

 

> _”j'avais des craintes sur la performance vocale d'Axl et sur l'accueil des nouveaux membres du groupe par les fans de la première heure. Autant tuer le suspens tout de suite : Axl n'a jamais aussi bien chanté. La prestation de ce dernier a depassé toutes mes espérances que ce soit au niveau du chant ou au niveau du respect envers le public [...] Les fans voulaient voir Slash [...] de personnes qui ne veulent pas faire le deuil de leur adolescence et qui dénigrent l'évolution artistique [...] je soutiens la démarche qu'entreprend cette rock star qui envers et contre tous va montrer au monde entier sa capacité à se renouveller (et que les gens peuvent changer). Merci à Guns N'Roses”_  
>  ★★★★★
> 
> (Critique écrite le 24 juin 2006 par Sébastien)

 

 

 

Once upon a time in Athens, there was a monument of a boat with rotting planks. In order to preserve the ship, the rotting planks were periodically replaced with new planks made of the same material.

The Ship of Theseus - a thought experiment, a simple question with no simple answer: if you alter even one of the planks, is it still the same ship?

How many parts can you replace before it’s no longer recognizable as the original?

 

How long before it’s not even yours anymore?

 

 

 

Maybe calling Slash a “cancer” is uncalled for.

It feels good to say in the moment, hearing the thought out loud, but reading the words in print the next day makes Axl’s stomach turn. If Slash sees it, which he does, at least he has the dignity to not respond directly through the likes of Billboard magazine.

Axl doesn’t want to think about what his reaction must have been. He certainly doesn’t want to think about the bitter, vindictive part of himself that hopes it hurt.

 

_No. Wrong._

 

He wonders when it got so bad that even thirteen years haven’t been enough to let the blood wash out. 

 

“Axl and Slash, right?”

“Yeah. Axl and Slash.”

 

The two of them. Dynamic duo. Long nights and talking, drinking, wet and sloppy and thrumming bones and skin and skin and skin, _together with the music and together against the world_.

But then again, even that couldn’t be considered special. They all had their attachments - five was an odd number; divided up into twos and situations and rooms, beds, girls (“it’s not gay, dude, she has room for both of us”), drugs, drinking, you name it. Shifting. Changing. Always dependant.

Axl and Izzy, Axl and Duff, Duff and Izzy, Duff and Steven, Duff and Slash, Slash and Izzy, Steven and Slash,

And Steven—

 

After everything is said and done, Axl knows it’s worse for Steven. Maybe more than anyone else.

Axl’s seen him, read the book, heard the story, watched _Celebrity Rehab_ ; five years of living in the world’s most dangerous rock band, and all the kid wound up with was speech therapy, $2.5 million and a cautionary tale.

 

Adler. Popcorn. California Indica Bud. Just the drummer. Laid up in a hospital bed relearning how to talk.

 

No matter what, it’s still always worse for Steven.

 

 

 

The machine that they became broke Duff’s goddamn heart and nearly took his body for good measure. By the time the last tour finished, Guns was a five piece puzzle strewn apart all over the last decade.

And there was Duff; dear, sweet Mother Goose, still holding out hope over nothing but dust and shouting matches.

Fucker never knew when to quit.

 

Axl loves him for that.

He hates him for it, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for Izzy, well. He’s better off rolling than rocking these days.

Other than a few guest appearances, he and Axl don’t keep in touch all that regularly - a childhood of commiseration ensures that they possess the inherent ability to go weeks or months at a time without talking, yet still pick up exactly where they left off.

 

 **The question:** Where’s Izzy?

 **The answer:** If you ever find yourself asking that, it means he doesn’t want to he found by you.

 

Axl keeps a couple CDs of that bluesy, country shit of his in the car. He won’t call it comfort, but it’s close.

Sometimes he wonders if maybe it’s time for him to take another trip back to the farm.

 

 

 

> _“My whole thing was that I really, in my heart of hearts, wanted to have the whole original band get together and actually perform [at the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony], which I sort of knew was wishful thinking. When the whole thing first came up, that’s basically what I wanted to do. It became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen [...] I was sort of disillusioned with the whole thing, but there was that commitment that was sort of made that I was going to go, and I thought Axl was still going to go, and it wasn’t until the last minute that I heard that he wasn’t coming, and that’s when we all decided we were just going to go ahead and play anyway [...] I have to admit, I was like, "Oh fuck, I don’t really want to go to this if we’re not going to play.” ___
> 
> __**Slash on ‘Closing the Book on Guns N’ Roses’**  
>  (Rolling Stone - April 25, 2012)_ _

__  
__  


__

__

__

__He misses them. Of course he does - they’re his brothers, after all. Even so many years later._ _

__Doesn’t matter if he’s twenty-two or fifty-two, doesn’t matter if he’s angry or sad, doesn’t matter if he’s on his meds or not. He’s still getting nowhere on thirteen inches of a dirt track with the same red rope around his neck._ _

__

__At least the rest of them have families by now. Wives. Kids. Nice houses. Evidence of moving on._ _

__Duff’s got two beautiful girls, and Slash’s got two beautiful boys. Steven’s got Carolina. Who knows who Izzy has — a guitar, a truck, and a dog, at the very least._ _

__

__Axl never really wanted any of that for himself. Still doesn’t. He can’t even begin to imagine that level of domesticity; family pictures on the walls, vacuuming crushed Cheerios out of the carpet and a little, faceless human being with red hair and a soft, tiny hand enclosed within the broad warmth of his own._ _

__He can’t imagine it, and he won’t, and now he’s staring age fifty-three down as if it’s something distasteful on a dinner plate, faced with the discovery that he sure as hell doesn’t want this empty house, either._ _

__

__

__Theseus. Big hero with a rotting boat, less his and more a monster with every day that passes._ _

__

__

__

__It gets lonely, in his heart. In his hands. In the wake of those lights, blinding him like suns._ _

__

__

__

__

____

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @[shotgunmessiahs](http://shotgunmessiahs.tumblr.com)


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